Animation in the United States in the television era

"[7] Cartoons in the Golden Age, such as the works of The Fleischer Brothers and Tex Avery, contained topical and often suggestive humor, though they were seen primarily as "children's entertainment" by movie exhibitors.

This guaranteed a long life for the characters of Mighty Mouse and Heckle and Jeckle, whose cartoons were syndicated and rerun in children's television programming blocks for the next 30 to 40 years.

[9] Animation on television focused almost exclusively on children, and the tradition of getting up early to watch Saturday morning cartoons became a weekly ritual for millions of American kids.

Such critics of Hanna-Barbera's style of limited animation as Chuck Jones referred to it disparagingly as "illustrated radio", yet when one show was cancelled, the studio usually had another one ready to replace it because they were so cheap to produce.

CBS in particular allowed a large number of animated TV specials to air on its network, and several of these continue to be repeated annually and sold on video and DVD.

The Rankin-Bass studio produced a number of stop-motion specials geared towards popular holidays (including Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, Frosty the Snowman, and Santa Claus Is Comin' to Town); while Bill Melendez's long-running series of Peanuts specials won numerous awards, spawned four feature films, and even launched a Saturday morning series.

Joe: A Real American Hero, The Transformers, My Little Pony 'n Friends, He-Man and the Masters of the Universe, She-Ra: Princess of Power, Jem and the Holograms, ThunderCats, Pound Puppies, and Care Bears.

But after the end of The Flintstones in 1966, Hanna-Barbera largely turned its efforts to the growing market for Saturday morning cartoons, outside of isolated series for first run syndication in the 1970s, aimed at adults instead of children, such as Where's Huddles?

Its original series of the late 1950s through mid-1960s all featured anthropomorphic animals, usually an adult (who would in turn impersonate a well-known celebrity) and child, interacting with the humans of their environment.

While theatrical short subjects were previously produced in six-month cycles or longer, networks needed a season of 10-20 half hour episodes every year.

The Jay Ward studio, producer of The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show, used limited animation in its series, but compensated with its satire of Cold War politics and popular culture and its off-beat humor.

After a string of Saturday-morning successes lasting well into the 1980s (chiefly Fat Albert), Filmation had several costly syndicated failures, namely Ghostbusters and BraveStarr, and a lawsuit from Disney over Happily Ever After, forcing its parent company Westinghouse to shut down the studio and sell off its library in 1989.

The result was that Cambria's cartoons (Clutch Cargo, Space Angel and Captain Fathom) contained hardly any animation at all, and were effectively pictures (albeit well-drawn ones that were of greater detail than other producers') with words.

In 1966, the studio brought A.A. Milne's Winnie-the-Pooh characters to the screen for the first time in two of four animated featurettes (the second of which, Winnie the Pooh and the Blustery Day, won an Oscar, the last Walt Disney received).

The new characters introduced during the Seven Arts period, such as Cool Cat, Bunny and Claude, Quick Brown Fox and Rapid Rabbit, and Merlin the Magic Mouse, never caught on, while the Termite Terrace cartoons remained perennial television favorites through syndication and Saturday morning airings throughout the remainder of the 20th century.

His most famous special was How the Grinch Stole Christmas!, a 1966 CBS adaptation of the Dr. Seuss story that still remains popular and has been released on video and DVD several times.

Jones also produced three animated adaptations of short stories from Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book, a full-length MGM feature film entitled The Phantom Tollbooth, and the 1970 TV version of Horton Hears a Who!

In 1981, Friz Freleng retired, and shortly thereafter Marvel Comics bought out the DFE studio, due largely to its pre-existing relationship from the commissioned shows The New Fantastic Four (1978) and Spider-Woman (1979).

This new studio continued saturday-morning fare but focused almost exclusively on licensed properties, first with Marvel shows like Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends and The Incredible Hulk, then shifting to Dungeons & Dragons and the long-lasting Muppet Babies.

Displeased with the previous animated television series depicting themselves, the Beatles themselves had reservations about the project at first and declined to participate beyond providing a mix of older and original musical recordings.

[14] In 1969, Ralph's Spot was founded as a division of Bakshi Productions to produce commercials for Coca-Cola and Max, the 2000-Year-Old Mouse, a series of educational shorts paid for by Encyclopædia Britannica.

[15][16] Bakshi was quoted in a 1971 article for the Los Angeles Times as saying that the idea of "grown men sitting in cubicles drawing butterflies floating over a field of flowers, while American planes are dropping bombs in Vietnam and kids are marching in the streets, is ludicrous.

The most notable work were the television series like Astro Boy, Gigantor, Kimba the White Lion, and Speed Racer in the 1960s; Mazinger Z, Battle of the Planets, Star Blazers, and Tales of Magic in the late 1970s; and Force Five, Astro Boy (1980), Voltron, Leo the Lion, Belle and Sebastian, Robotech, The Adventures of the Little Prince, Ulysses 31, The Mysterious Cities of Gold, Captain Harlock and the Queen of a Thousand Years, Macron 1, and Saber Rider and the Star Sheriffs in the 1980s.

For this reason, Mazinger Z, Battle of the Planets, and Astro Boy (1980) were dubbed a second time to Westernize them more and reappeared in 1985-6, the first two retitled Tranzor Z and G-Force: Guardians of Space.

Syndicated series stopped after the failure of Captain Harlock, Macron 1, and Saber Rider, and only Nickelodeon and HBO would program child-oriented anime through the end of the 1980s.

Although their impact on visual style and storytelling in North America was minimal for decades, the success of some of these series helped create the groundswell that would lead to mail-order VHS releases of adult-oriented movies and OVAs in the late 1980s.

Fine Arts Films, a studio founded by John David Wilson with offices in Hollywood and in England, became best known for its music videos (eg: Bob Dylan's "You Gotta Serve Somebody").

[23][24][25] This era has been continued to be satirized and/or spoofed even by the likes of the cult sci-fi series Futurama in the episode "Saturday Morning Fun Pit".

[32] Disney animator and director Byron Howard admitted that Robin Hood was his favorite film while growing up and cited it as a major influence on his 2016's Academy Award-winning Zootopia.

[33] The song "Whistle-Stop" was sped up and used in the Hampster Dance, one of the earliest internet memes,[34] and later used at normal speed in the Super Bowl XLVIII commercial for T-Mobile.